The actress and singer Janis Paige has died at the age of 101.
Long-time friend Stuart Lampert said on Monday that the actress from the Golden Age died of natural causes on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles.
With Jackie Cooper, Paige played the lead role in the mystery-comedy “Remains to be Seen” on Broadway. With John Raitt, she was in the smash hit musical “The Pajama Game.”
She also made the comedies “Bachelor in Paradise” with Bob Hope, “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” with Doris Day, and “Follow the Boys.”
In 2018, she joined the #MeToo movement and said that the late Alfred Bloomingdale, heir to a department store, had raped her when she was 22.
“I could feel his hands, not only on my breasts, but seemingly everywhere. He was big and strong, and I began to fight, kick, bite and scream,” she said.
“At 95, time is not on my side, and neither is silence. I simply want to add my name and say, Me too.”
During the war, Paige got her big break when she sang an opera aria for soldiers at the Hollywood Canteen.
The next day, MGM hired her for a small part in “Bathing Beauty.” She had two lines in the movie with Esther Williams and Red Skelton, and then they fired her.
She signed with Warner Bros. that same day and was cast in a dramatic part of the all-star movie “Hollywood Canteen.”
The first part of her deal paid $150 a week.
In 2018, she told The Hollywood Reporter, “I made more in a week than my mother had made in a month during the Great Depression.”
Studios kept her busy with light movies like “Two Guys from Milwaukee,” “The Time, the Place, and the Girl,” “Love and Learn,” “Always Together,” “Wallflower,” and “Romance on the High Seas,” which was Doris Day’s first movie. Her weekly pay went up to $1,000.
In the meantime, she had changed her name from Donna May Tjaden to Paige, which was her grandfather’s name.
Her first name comes from the famous performer Elsie Janis, who entertained soldiers in World War I.
Paige’s contract ended in 1949, which was a time when studios were getting rid of talent because TV was becoming so popular.
“That was a shock,” she said in 1963. “It meant I was done at 25.”
She took her acting skills to Broadway and starred in Remains to Be Seen. In the 1954 original production of The Pajama Game, which starred Raitt as Sid, she played Babe opposite him.
MGM producer Arthur Freed saw her in a nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and offered her a part in “Silk Stockings” with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.
In the Cole Porter number “Stereophonic Sound,” she and Astaire make fun of new movie tricks, like swinging from a chandelier. The scene is famous.
“I was one mass of bruises. I didn’t know how to fall. I didn’t know how to get down on a table I didn’t know how to save myself because I was never a classic dancer,” she told the Miami Herald back then.
Paige started entertaining again in May 2003, after a long break.
There was an opening for her show called “The Third Act” at the Plush Room in San Francisco.
She sang songs from her movies and stage musicals and told stories about Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, and other stars.
An Alameda Times-Star reviewer named Chad Jones said, “the charming Paige shows a vitality, verve, and spirit that performers half her age would envy.” Sage is 80 years old.
Paige was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. When she was four, her father left the family, and her mother barely made it at the Bank of Tacoma.
“We always had enough to eat,” Paige told the Sunday Evening Post in 1963, “but nothing to spare. My mother worked so hard. And she used to keep saying that she wished I’d been born a boy, so I could help out more. I always wanted to be a success for her, to make up for my father.”
After leaving Warner Bros., she went to work in TV, where she had recurring roles in “Flamingo Road,” “Santa Barbara,” “Eight Is Enough,” “Capitol,” “Fantasy Island,” and “Trapper Jon, M.D.” from 1955 to 1956.
She played a diner waitress on All in the Family who falls in love with Carroll OConnor’s character, Archie Bunker.
Paige took over for Angela Lansbury in the New York production of “Mame” in 1968. In 1969, she went on tour with the show.
She has also been on tour with “Gypsy,” “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Born Yesterday,” and “The Desk Set.” Her last show on Broadway was “Alone Together” in 1984.
She also made Hope look beautiful when she went to Cuba and the Caribbean for Christmas in 1960, Japan and South Korea in 1962, and Vietnam in 1964.
Some of the people she sang with in clubs were Dinah Shore, Perry Como, Sammy Davis Jr., and Alan King.
Paige was married for short periods of time to restaurateur Frank Martinelli in San Francisco and to writer and producer Arthur Stander.
She married songwriter Ray Gilbert in 1962. Gilbert won an Oscar for the song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Da” from Disney’s “Song of the South.” Gilbert died in 1976, and she took over running his music business.